from The Hermit by Lucy Ives

COMPANY EDITIONS is an independent publisher of poetry and visual art. The journal, Company, was founded in 2013 and is published three or four times per year. We will also be publishing chapbooks beginning in late 2016. Company Editions is based in Athens, GA, Iowa City, IA, and Cambridge, MA. You can contact the editors by emailing editors@companyeditions.com.

from THE HERMIT

Yesterday fielding a question from
Jay, something about why do I not write about affect, reply that for me the
only affect is—or affect is only—an expression of the wish, “Let me not be
destroyed.”

I remember the precision with which
I experienced time when young. I am only saying this since there is almost
nothing that can restore this precision, this specificity, except arousal.

I can’t describe myself as a poet.
I’m the author of some kind of thinking about writing.

33.

That a kind of experiential or
“in-the-world” engagement should impinge on how a canon is taught. Nearby
these notes now, on the same page, a fragment has appeared: “que les étudiantsontdécidéd’abandoner, joyeusement, leur passé”

From a list of texts to read: Susan
Howe, “Statement for the New Poetics Colloquium, Vancouver. 1985”

34.

Imagine that love between two
people is of such parity that one has only to hear the other speak and then,
in an instant, remembers years of kindness. Yet why won’t the other speak
now? Why does he seem to become lost, as if inside his own living?

35.

An essay occurs in time like dog
years, where it isn’t a task of reasoning so much as something that befalls
one. I perhaps don’t read or write enough and yet always feel like I am
reading, like I am writing.

36.

One must work, perhaps for some
time, to see scenes.

[…]

43.

If someone fears me I may think,
“At least I am a woman.”

From a list of books to read:
Mustapha Khayati, De la misère en
milieu étudiant

44.

You tell yourself it is a desire to
fade, to walk backward into scenery. This is the general way in which you
despair about friendships.

In movies there is no such thing as
“experience” for the professional—who is, therefore, a type—only necessity,
skills.

I find a fragment written on an
index card: “rescues” address by converting it into allegory = author as hero

45.

A game: Imagines a past version of
herself and compares present iteration to this—or, rather, present self is
paraded before past self for judgment. Past self has powers of speech and
imagination. Present self is, interestingly, too preoccupied with own current
problems to give much shrift to past. Present self extremely difficult to
speak to; in fact, taciturn, keeps looking in the wrong direction.